In the meeting room called the Communist Auditorium, students filed in. There were whispers rustling across the aisles; there was an occasional chair scraping the floor, and she saw Andrei among the other sixth graders two rows behind her. Their gym teacher was rubbing her eyes with her fists, and their usually stern and erect principal, Natalia Petrovna, was plodding to the front of the room, her shoulders slumped. She stood silently, waiting for the last whisper to die down, and Sasha saw a tear rolling down her cheek that she didn’t even attempt to dry.

“Today is a day of mourning for all of us,” she began in a fragile voice unfitting for a principal. “Our great leader, our father, our genius, our dear Comrade Stalin has died.” Her last words were barely audible, but everyone heard them in the absolute silence that now congealed the air in the room, in the whole school, in the entire town. It was so quiet that Sasha heard the steady dripping of water from a melting icicle hitting the sill outside the window. She was probably one of the very few people there who’d seen the real, live Stalin in Red Square three years earlier, which was still as clear in her memory as if she’d looked at it through the shiny glass of a newly washed window.

The principal covered her face with her hand because her mouth was trembling and she couldn’t utter anything else. Their math teacher, whom Sasha had seen sniffling on the stair landing, sidled up to the principal with her conveniently unfolded checkered handkerchief. The steel-like Natalia Petrovna was now weeping openly, as if all her teachers and pupils had been lined up and executed by the Nazis right in front of her, a scene from a war film they’d recently watched in their history class.

Sasha looked around surreptitiously, because they had been told to keep their heads down, and saw Marik’s mother’s dry face across the aisle. Her head was down, and her fingers were braided under her chest as if she were praying, although they all knew that praying was a rudiment of their dark tsarist past, along with serfdom and unemancipated women. Sasha was the only one in her line of vision, with the exception of Marik and his mother, who wasn’t crying or, at least, pretending to cry. She couldn’t see Andrei, who was two rows behind her, but she was sure his eyes were also dry. She could not imagine twelve-year-old Andrei, with hair as black as tar and arms strong enough to lift her into the air when the three of them played, casting his eyes down and shedding tears over Comrade Stalin’s sudden death.